Between 639 and the nineteenth century the Basilica of Saint-Denis was the burial place of forty-three kings and thirty-two queens of France. Cavaillé- Coll's initial proposal was for an organ of eighty-four stops, to be built over three years at a cost of 80,000 francs. Delays in the rebuilding of the cathedral allowed him time to reduce the stops to seventy-one.

The magnificent instrument M. Cavaillé has installed in the Église Saint-Denis has received unanimous approval. Even the maker's rivals are agreed in praising it, and organists can't stifle the regret that such a fine piece of work does emphatically not belong to Paris. It is indeed an admirable organ which combines, together with the finest qualities of the best organs of its kind, others which are unique to itself, thanks to details invented beyond doubt by M. Cavaillé. Its diapasons are very powerful, the reeds very strong and sonorous, and the cor anglais stop has a delightful timbre. There is a slight fault in the sixteen-foot stops in that the pedals are slow to speak. A remarkable new effect is that of the crescendo achieved by a mechanism placed under the feet but above the pedals, and which allows the organist to add as many stops as he likes without taking his hands off the keyboard. This is truly splendid, and you have to hear the build-up of these choruses, these accumulating orchestras, to have a real idea of this invention's merits. The vox humana, which seems to have been made in imitation of that in Fribourg, is far from being as perfect.

One of Valencia's most spectacular and sometimes lucrative periods of literary production spanned the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century. The burgeoning literary industry was kindled by the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the consolidation of the city's professional managers, such as physicians, lawyers, and religious personnel, individuals who were frequently multi-vocational, as in the case of Jaume Roig. The new technology and frequent multi-professionalism of writers at the time were of fundamental importance to the Espill's print history, since the bound text was often accompanied by a select number of other titles in the same volume, several of which were written collaboratively by multi-professional men like Roig. To my knowledge, no scholar has speculated about how many copies of the Espill might have been printed in the sixteenth century, although 54 extant volumes have been catalogued so far. This extraordinary number of printed copies of the Espill has only been widely brought to light in the last two to three decades, thanks to the efforts of the following scholars and academic teams: the monumental article of 2004 by Joan Mahiques Climent about the book's wide availability in print; an important article, although more limited in scope, by Josep Lluís Martos in 2014; Antònia Carré's summary of the topic in the introduction to her edition of 2014; and the ongoing cataloguing efforts over the last two to three decades of the scholarly teams at BITECA / PhiloBiblon and Iberian Books.

A d-dimensional (bar-and-joint) framework (G, p) consists of a graph G = (V, E) and a realisation p : V → Rd. It is rigid if every continuous motion of the vertices which preserves the lengths of the edges is induced by an isometry of Rd. The study of rigid frameworks has increased rapidly since the 1970’s, stimulated by numerous applications in areas such as civil and mechanical engineering, CAD, molecular conformation, sensor network localisation, and low rank matrix completion. We will describe some of the main results in combinatorial rigidity theory and their applications to other areas of combinatorics, putting an emphasis on links to matroid theory.

The Belgian instrument-maker Adolphe Sax (1814–94) arrived in Paris in 1842. In the first edition of Berlioz's Grand Traité, of the Sax instruments only the saxophone is considered; others, such as saxhorns, are treated in the second edition (1855). Berlioz's promotion of Sax's work helped get him established in Paris; in another quid pro quo (cf. that with Alexandre; see article 42), Sax in turn offered Berlioz facilities for rehearsal and storing the considerable quantity of performing parts needed for his concerts.

The size of concert halls is generally proportionate to the love the public are supposed to have for music, and their interior arrangement is in keeping with the kind of music to be performed there. That's why we don't have a large concert hall in Paris. There are halls for banquets, halls for balls, halls for drawing lots for military conscription etc., but we haven't got a single concert-hall worthy of the name that can be hired when you need one. Hence the impossibility of performing certain compositions, if theatres either won't or can't be transformed into concert halls, and especially during the winter when the exclusive use of the furniture repository of the Crown, itself extremely small, is reserved for the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire.

Some years ago, M. Herz had an excellent hall built for medium-sized concerts, that is for those where you can hear instrumentalists and singers accompanied by a piano or small orchestra. But even apart from the fact that the stage is badly placed for even a body of forty performers, it's impossible for seating the large orchestra of today; from which it follows that one can't even think of adding any kind of chorus.

I entered medieval studies when a great loss had rocked the Arthurian world. Maureen Fries, the godmother of feminist Arthurian studies, died in 1999. Two years later, Fiona Tolhurst and Bonnie Wheeler published a Festschrift in her honor: On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries. It was a collection very much like this one for a beloved scholar whose life – and whose loss – would forever shape her colleagues, students, and friends. Now, writing in honor of Fiona Tolhurst herself, whose death occurred two years ago – not long after I left the field – I can't help but feel that my journey has ended where it began, with a tragic loss, with a beloved, bright light flickering out.

He could now see clearly; and there was only one thing he could not see clearly—what was to be done. Should he take as a model that ridiculous duke, whom Judith had judged so unsparingly with the simple words, “I think it's overdone”? No, that would never do … And what, in any case, had actually happened? Only that which had to happen. Had he not always prided himself on his knowledge of the world and people and, above all, on his freedom from prejudice with regard to what he called the natural course of things? What now gave him the right to assume that this natural course of things would turn into its opposite for his sake?

He had returned from sister Judith's to the other wing of the mansion, and now, deep in such reflections, which constantly turned into self-accusations, he paced up and down on the rug in his room. He opened the window and looked down on the quiet street; the sounds of the city could be heard, muted, from the distance. An open carriage with a young couple in it rolled past, and the gaslight from the lanterns fell on the slender figure of a girl or woman who was leaning, tired and happy, on the shoulder of her sweetheart.

“They’re young and in love. And that's natural! I was a fool to think up something for myself—half Scheherazade but half St. Elizabeth; a lady of fashion, but at the same time, a nun; a female esprit fort, but in a cloister.

Anyone who knows Berlioz's music could probably guess the likely tone of his comparison between the two composers. But at least Berlioz has the honesty to doubt its value …

I don't think the review of this concert will occupy my readers for long (one always imagines one has readers). The concert was entrancing, it must be said, and the orchestra performed miracles, especially in Beethoven's First Symphony. You have to hear our violins and see them flying away in [the Trio of] the Scherzo, to believe in the possibility of such nuances being observed by thirty bows simultaneously. It's astonishing. I’m not talking about that pattern which wends its way through the wind section, as light and swift as a puff of wind: we know what our violinists are capable of technically. In any case, that in itself does not present any problems; it's the delicacy of the legato that calls for praise, because there are a score of ways of playing such a passage correctly, and a score of ways passably; this is the right, excellent, and marvellous way. The audience was thrilled and demanded an encore of the Scherzo. For Beethoven this symphony was the point of departure. Its form is smaller and its style less grand than in the symphonies that followed; that it even lacks the sublime aspirations that marked the composer's later works is beyond doubt. But such as it is, how far superior I find it to Haydn's G major Symphony (Opus 51) that we heard in the same concert!

I’m very far from lacking respect for Haydn's genius, and further still from belittling the admirable music in this same work, the Andante of which is delightful.

Around 1528, the Bruges playwright Cornelis Everaert (?–1556) started an autograph collection of his dramatic oeuvre in which he copied his plays and added several notes which allow us to situate some plays in their performance context. As a result, we know that he took considerable pride in the fact that some of his politically conformist plays were awarded prizes by the authorities. His Tspel van den Hooghen Wynt ende Zoeten Reyn (‘The Play of the High Wind and Sweet Rain’), which was composed ‘in honour of our Emperor Charles, when the King of France was taken prisoner at Pavia in the year 1525’ (ter eeren van Kaerle onsen Keyser, als den conync van Vranckerycke ghevanghen wiert voor Pavyen ao 1525: headnote), comes with a marginal annotation that states that it had won ‘the first prize awarded by the city, which was a silver tray’ (uppren prys van den stede upghestelt ende was een selveren scale). At the same time, he also chose to include in his collection two plays which he claims had been banned from being performed due to their controversial content. Everaert's collection therefore stands witness to the complicated relationship between plays and censorship, drama and authority in the sixteenth-century Low Countries and allows unique insight into both political critique and censorship in action.

Although scholars have acknowledged the inclusion of these two banned plays, they have nevertheless been at best tentative in acknowledging quite how critical the playwright could be. Jacob Wijbrand Muller labelled Everaert a ‘semi-revolutionary playwright’ (halfrevolutionnaire toneeldichter) whose ‘half-hearted criticism’ (halfslachtige critiek) is ‘smothered halfway’ (halverwege gesmoord) with the plays ending in praise.

Abstract: This essay argues that Faust is no homo economicus in part one. He is not the self-interested, future-oriented, rational agent with stable preferences that he becomes in part two. Rather, he represents an error-prone human making risky decisions that are, in fact, gambles. Gretchen also makes a series of increasingly risky bets, but the stakes are very different for her. In Faust I, Goethe demonstrates insight into human behavior that aligns with and illustrates fundamental elements of behavioral economics, which studies how people act in the real world and thus human error. Combining economic and psychological methods, behavioral economics has identified heuristics—mental shortcuts or rules of thumb—and biases that do not conform to the model of the calculating, self-interested homo economicus long championed by economists. The tools of behavioral economics—prospect theory, nudging, and loss aversion—illuminate the all-too-human decisions made by Faust, Gretchen, and others in Faust I. Goethe exhibits an advanced understanding of decision-making that he embeds in the choice architecture of part one.

Keywords: behavioral economics, decision-making, loss aversion, nudging, choice architecture, gambling, homo economicus

Introduction

Homo economicus is a mainstay of economic theory. Economic historians credit John Stuart Mill with introducing the concept without naming it in “On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It” (1836).

Count Egon was as good as his word, and two days later, when the two friends returned from their midday stroll, they found two visiting cards, which had been delivered by a hired servant while the countess herself had waited by the veranda in an open carriage. Phemi turned her card this way and that in her hands and read, as she emphasized every single word, “‘Imperial Countess Judith von Gundolskirchen, nee Petofy.’ Marvelous. And when I’m back in Vienna, this is going on the top of my tray. I have no lack of counts—but by the same token, countesses are much rarer. Trust me, Franzl, this kind of thing doesn't just look nice; it's useful. And you have to make use of every favorable breeze … And in a carriage, you said, Hannah?”

“Yes, a carriage,” Hannah confirmed. “It was just the carriage from the hotel, but everything was fit for an aristocrat. The driver had gloves on. He looked so solemn that I had to laugh. And on top of that, that tall fellow Sepp as a hired servant, with a frock coat on. And it was all just for us, Fraulein Phemi, truly, just for us. Because I saw them turn around at the next corner, and before I could count to a hundred, they were drawing up at the King of Hungary again.”

Franziska was more dismayed than pleased. It was true that the winter evenings at the countess's were an entirely pleasant memory, but she had no wish to see a resumption of those earlier relations.

The news of a betrothal between the count and Franziska was much talked about. But a month later, when the double ceremony had taken place, first in the Augustinian Church and then in the Protestant church in Gumpendorfer Street, the excitement subsided, and all the more quickly because all that might be said in the way of spiteful bon mots had already been put into circulation in the days beforehand. In any case, none of it reached the ears of the noble couple, who had immediately left to spend several weeks in northern Italy. They took with them only Andras and Josephine, a freshly engaged lady's maid, Viennese through and through. Their return trip would take them directly to Arpa Castle; Hannah and several of the servants had already gone there as soon as the wedding was over. Franziska had found it hard to part from her, but, precisely because they were so very close, had judged this separation necessary.

The stay in Italy began at Lake Garda; then came a visit to Venice, which was even lovelier than the Venice of Franziska's thoughts and dreams. Nonetheless, after ten days of eating ice cream of every kind and feeding countless bags of peas to the pigeons in St. Mark's Square, she was happy on the eleventh day to see their sojourn end, especially since the count was prepared to make stops along the way back; most importantly, in Verona, his garrison town of more than fifty years ago, and the scene of his first triumphs.

The Library Register, dated on the vigil of Christmas 1418, confirmed what Dyngley already knew. Augustine was not represented among the books that could be assigned to the associates (assignata sociis) and was only minimally represented in the chained collection. At about this time Dyngley was copying a series of indexes for the Old and New Testaments, and he also had in hand a copy of Robert Kilwardby's patristic tabulary, largely devoted to Augustine. The next step was straightforward. Dyngley would extract indexes from the Kilwardby tabulary and copy them in tandem with Augustine's texts, thereby filling the lacuna in the Peterhouse holdings. Eventually he widened the scope to include other patristic authors. His patristic project would thus provide not only authentic copies of the originalia but also instrumenta studiorum, the finding tools essential for tapping the wisdom of the Fathers. In order to integrate the finding tools, Dyngley developed an efficient working strategy with his primary text writer, known as the Fish Scribe because he drew a fish around catchwords. This chapter describes the characteristic features of the manuscripts copied for the patristic project: the introductory template (the perpenditur preface and table of contents, typically written on a guard page, Tables 2.1 and 2.2); the finding tools, the Kilwardby source and Dyngley's reconstructed indexes (Table 2.3); the working protocol estab-lished between Dyngley and the Fish Scribe (Table 2.5); and the recorded costs with special attention to limning (Tables 2.6 and 2.7).

—Johannes Brahms

During the same period that saw the resolution of the German Question, Brahms was completing a major work in which “German” was written into its very name. Ein deutsches Requiem nach Worten der heiligen Schrift, op. 45, for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, is the longest and in many respects the most ambitious work of Brahms's career, and the one that first brought him widespread international fame. What it is not, in my view, is a German nationalist work, at least not in the political sense that is seen so clearly in the Fünf Lieder für Männerchor. (The national significance that would attach to the work after 1870, however, is another matter altogether, as we shall see.) Although the slow funeral march heard in the second movement evidently derives from an aborted duo sonata that was conceived under the pall cast by Robert Schumann's tragic collapse in 1854, most of the composition dates from the mid-1860s. Whatever the connection to Schumann may be, it is reasonable to assume that the death of the composer's beloved mother, on February 2, 1865, was the work's primary motivation. Writing to Clara Schumann in April of that year, Brahms made mention of the first two movements and included a piano score of the fourth, which he described as a “choral piece … from a kind of German Requiem.”

Another clue to the political meaning of Collier's anti-stage tracts is his interaction with the first two reform comedies, Cibber's Love's Last Shift (first performed in January 1696 at Drury Lane) and Vanbrugh's The Relapse; Or, Virtue in Danger (first performed in November 1696 at Drury Lane). Because they were produced before the publication of A Short View in 1698, the emergence of Reform Comedy was not a response to Collier. Yet, this fact should be treated with care as it neither precludes all causal relationships between Collier's criticism and Reform Comedy nor renders, as Hume contends, Collier's ‘impact on genre, short or long term […] negligible’. What is worth noting here is that Collier rarely mentioned Cibber's play but reacted violently to Vanbrugh's sequel to it. In Love's Last Shift, the virtuous wife, Amanda, was married to Loveless, a man ‘of a debaucht life’, who ‘left her, and the Town, for Debts he did not care to pay’ in the second year of marriage and wandered around Europe for eight years. Remaining constant at his return, she successfully reformed Loveless by seducing him into her bed without revealing her identity as his wife beforehand. In contrast, The Relapse inverted the process of reform and narrated the protagonists’ degeneration from virtue into vice. When Loveless relapsed into his old hedonistic lifestyle, Amanda's virtuous image was gradually deconstructed to the extent that she almost surrendered to Mr Worthy's gallantry at the end of the play.

Christine Weder, Ruth Signer, and Peter Wittemann, eds. Auszeiten. Temporale Ökonomien des Luxus in Literatur und Kultur der Moderne. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023. 310 pp.

This rich and multifaceted edited volume addresses the temporal economies of luxury, and it is the first in a book series titled Luxus und Moderne, edited by Christine Weder and Hans-Georg von Arburg that has emerged from a Swiss-based research group. There has been good recent scholarship on shifting conceptions of luxury as well as on the multivalent temporalities of modernity but not much on their intersections. This volume approaches such intersections broadly, though the core of the essays deal with the mid- and late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A concentrated set of essays focus on literary and aesthetic debates from this period, with multiple contributors attending to shifting concepts of luxury and free time and the related semantics associated with both fields. In addition, the volume is admirably interdisciplinary, representing approaches from literary studies, philosophy, social theory, visual studies, cultural history, and more. Multiple essays return to visual studies approaches to explore how images of various sorts negotiate concepts of luxury. This mixture of approaches results in what might be considered an extended interdisciplinary conceptual history of luxury and its temporal filiations. There are several key literary-aesthetic inflection points that multiple contributors return to, including Rousseau's luxury critique, reading debates at the end of the eighteenth century, and aesthetic shifts characteristic of the Goethezeit. In this context, the volume editors mark their focus on temporal rather than material aspects of luxury, which have been dealt with more by the scholarship.